Berry Global Group, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by and welcome to the Berry Global Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Dustin Stilwell. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Barry's fourth fiscal quarter 2021 earnings call. Throughout this call, we will refer to the fourth fiscal quarter as the September 2021 quarter. Before we begin our call, I would like to mention that on our website, we have provided a slide presentation to help guide our discussion this morning. After today's call, a replay will also be available on our website at barryglobal.com under our investor relations section. Joining me from the company are I have various Chief Executive Officer Tom Salmon and Chief Financial Officer Mark Miles. Following Tom and Mark's comments today, we'll have a question and answer session. In order to allow everyone the opportunity to participate, we do ask that you limit yourself to one question at a time with a brief follow-up and then fall back into the queue for any additional questions. As referenced on slide two, during this call, we will be discussing some non-GAAP financial measures, the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of the differences between the GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures are available in our earnings release and investor presentation on our website. And finally, a reminder that certain statements made today may be forward-looking statements. These statements are made based upon management's expectations and beliefs concerning future events impacting the company and therefore involve a number of uncertainties and risks, including but not limited to those described in our earnings release and a report on Form 10-K and other filings with the SEC. Therefore, the actual results of operations or financial condition of the company differ materially from those expressed or implied in our four looking statements. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Barry's CEO, Tom Salmon.

Thank you, Dustin. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for being with us today. Let's begin this morning on slide four, where we've laid out our key takeaways for today. First, Our fourth fiscal quarter results were solid, as revenues were a record for any September quarter and free cash flow was a record for any period in our company's history, in spite of unprecedented inflation and supply chain challenges we faced across the world. For the fiscal year 2021 was another outstanding year at Barry, as we achieved 4% organic volume growth on top of 2% in fiscal 2020, with all four segments delivering strong organic volumes during the year. Revenues and adjusted earnings per share, which were both annual records, grew by 18% and 20% respectfully. Our teams have worked diligently to offset the challenges created by COVID, inflation, labor, and supply chain challenges, while demonstrating an exceptional ability to remain focused on driving long-term sustainable growth and delivering the results you see today. Barry's resilience is a continued reminder of the diverse and robust global portfolio we've built through strategic portfolio management. The second key takeaway was our commitment to improve our strong balance sheet and drive leverage lower. I'm proud to say that as a result of our strong and stable earnings and cash flow, we've been able to reduce our leverage by a half a turn since the beginning of fiscal year, and a full turn in just two years, ending the year at 3.8 times net debt to adjusted EBITDA. Getting below four times was a top priority for us, and as we've stated before, we anticipate operating our company in a leverage range of 3 to 3.9 times. And lastly, we are focused on capitalizing on our strong base by investing in a number of organic growth initiatives, including innovation and sustainability-led projects, which will maintain our growth momentum in fiscal 22 and beyond. Next, let me turn to our number one core value on slide five, and that's safety. Keeping all our teammates healthy and safe is a key priority. As you can see on the slide, we have an ongoing commitment to identifying, managing, and minimizing safety risk. During the past few years, the pandemic presented many challenges across our global footprint. Our GlobalBerry team stepped up, took on the challenge, implemented and maintained new protocols while keeping each other safe. And in spite of these added challenges of operating during the pandemic, our safety performance has continued to show improvement and we're very proud of our industry leadership delivering an OSHA incident rate below one for the fiscal year 21, significantly better than the industry average of 3.7. Our team's emphasis on working safely and servicing our customers has ensured an uninterrupted supply of the essential products that we produce. This has made us a stronger and better company, giving us great optimism on the company's future success. Additionally, as you can see on the slide, We have a strong commitment to ensure that we are providing better opportunities and bringing innovation to provide multiple lives to natural resources while heading many initiatives with industry and external partners to improve circularity and our carbon footprint. Turning now to the financial highlights on slide six. For the fourth fiscal quarter, revenue was up 22% and was a record for any September quarter. Overall demand for our products remained solid and certain markets, which previously experienced pandemic headwinds, continued to improve. Volumes for the quarter were essentially flat, coming off a strong prior year comparison of 4% in September 2020. Pre-cash flow was a quarterly record at $512 million. Throughout fiscal 2021, we experienced significant cost increases in our primary raw material, that being resin, as well as inflation, other raw materials, freight, and labor on top of supply chain challenges. As you can see, we experienced a significant increase in the level of inflation and recovered 92% of record cost inflation in the September quarter and 95% of the over $1.5 billion of cost inflation during the fiscal year. As we've demonstrated historically, we remain committed to passing through cost inflation and believe we are well positioned, given our scale, to serve our customers with our facilities in close proximity to their locations. looking at some of our financial year highlights on slide seven. Fiscal year 21 was an exceptional year with record revenues and earnings, leverage reduction inside our targeted range, along with an unwavering commitment to service our customers in a challenging supply chain environment through much of the fiscal year, all while building strong momentum in each of our businesses heading into fiscal year 22. For the year, revenue is up over 18%, including organic volume growth of 4%, with all four segments showing 3% or more organic volume growth. From an earnings perspective, our operating EBITDA increased by 3% on a comparable basis to a record $2,224,000,000. Adjusted earnings per share was also an annual record and increased by an impressive 20% to $5.80 per share. Additionally, as I mentioned, we have used our consistent and dependable free cash flow to further strengthen our balance sheet, and have reduced net debt over $1 billion in the last four quarters and ended the year inside our leverage range target. Our employees around the world have shown an unwavering attention on executing against our strategies, and as a result, we delivered on our priorities with another year of exceptional results while building strong momentum going into the future. Now I'll turn the call over to Mark, who will review Barry's financial results in more detail. Mark?